Utility Fog

Sunday, 25th of August, 2024

There's quite a lean towards ambient sounds tonight - not all peaceful, mind. There's some shattering noise and many glitchy loops and sound-beds. But there's also hip-hop, skittering IDM, stripped-down grime, and re-imagined acoustic folk.

LISTENING AGAIN is medically proven to promote mental acuity. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast right here.

Dealers of God - Thundercloudz [Dealers of God Bandcamp]
But... what does it all mean? I admit I'm not the most attentive to lyrics when I'm listening to music, but when Naarm/Melbourne hip-hop group/cartel/gang Dealers of God sent me their forthcoming album Flesh Bill Clinton Humanoid Skeleton, and after I'd signed the necessary NDAs and read the heavily-redacted FBi file, I was still almost entirely in the dark about whatever sinister truths of the Deep State had been uncovered here. All other questions aside, the band genuinely have collaborated with Roger Eno, Brian's pianist brother. All other identities are hidden (although I'm sure I've heard Johnathan Citizen's name before). The music is equally hard to pin down - sudden punk onslaught, extended ambient crunk passages etc. "Thundercloudz", previewed exclusively for you tonight, is more straightforwardly hip-hop than much of the rest, and also quite melodic. The blissful piano & synth loop takes me back to early '90s Oz indie electronic bands like Single Gun Theory somehow...

B Dolan - "Turn A Mill" (Unnatural Entities Remix) [B Dolan Bandcamp]
It's been a long time since the last album proper from poet & underground hip-hop activist B Dolan. Emergency spinal surgery 4 years ago derailed his life and healing from that is central to the album he put out earlier this year, The Wound Is Not The Body. Dolan has also run a Discord server for a while, where among other things, fans can submit remixes, and out of that community comes this really nice remix of "Turn A Mill" with a heavy bass beat from Digital Monster & Mr. Bombcamp who together are Unnatural Entities.

Herbert - Fallen (feat Momoko Gill) [Accidental Records/Bandcamp]
Back in the mid-1990s, some of the earliest releases from Matthew Herbert under his Herbert moniker were the Parts EPs, 1-5 (digital reissues can be found on Herbert's Bandcamp). In 2014, the series returned with Part Six, followed by Part Seven, and then Part Eight in 2015. So it's about time for Part 9! These releases are avenues for Herbert's jazzy r'n'b-inflected deep house, always a delight. On the first single from Part 9, vocals come from singer/songwriter/drummer Momoko Gill.

SHATR Collective - Salim [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp]
From the always forward-thinking Beirut/Montréal label Ruptured Records comes a challenging, moving album of poetry and modular synthesis from SHATR Collective, with music by Sarah Huneidi and voices/poetry from Theresa Sahyoun (mostly in English) and Nadine Makarem (in Arabic). These pieces are visceral responses to the genocide in Gaza, indeed referencing the killing of Palestinian poets - Sahyoun's "Salim" is about Salim Al Naffar. The emotion in the spoken words is palpable, and along with the stark electronics it can be difficult listening - as it probably should be. 100% of proceeds go to ULYP (Unite Lebanon Youth Project) Gaza Student Emergency Fund.

ENDON - Time Does Not Heal [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
In "Salim", Theresa Sahyoun speaks of how the numb, desperate feeling during this ongoing genocide is not - precisely - grief. The new album Fall of Spring from Japanese noise band ENDON grapples directly with grief, coming 4 years after the death of Etsuo Nagura, brother of vocalist Taichi Nagura. After the departure of drummer Shin Yokota as well, the remaining three members decided to continue without replacing those members, and Fall of Spring is - well... in some ways it could be described as less aggressive, but still noise and harshness is the dominant mode of the four tracks; it's just cut through with a little more beauty, and in service of anguish. The 6-minute "Time Does Not Heal" is the album's emotional and musical centrepiece, with torturous noise doused in massive, rumbling bass, tumbling synth-percussion and buried melodies, mostly subsuming Nagura's pained howls.

Dal:um - Cracking [Glitterbeat/Bandcamp]
Hamburg-based label Glitterbeat has put out three remarkable albums from South Korean musician Park Jiha, and in 2021 released the first album from the duo Dal:um, made up of Ha Suyean on the gayageum and Hwang Hyeyoung ongeomungo, two Korean stringed instruments. Their follow-up, Coexistence, is coming out soon, with second single "Cracking" finding the duo at their most rhythmic and percussive.

Chloe Kim 김예지 - Bonus Track I: Bass Dance [People Sound]
Chloe Kim 김예지 - Movement I: When We Foresee [People Sound]
After embarking on her 100 Hours project, in which she performed drums for 10 hours straight on 10 consecutive days, Sydney-based Korean musician Chloe Kim 김예지 was looking for something different, and her love of double bass led her to the idea of multiple double basses playing together. Initially she'd conceived of a double bass quartet, and the music was premiered in that configuration with Helen Svoboda, Harry Birch, Oscar Neyland, and Paddy Fitzgerald as the double bassists in question. But the final recorded form grew into Music For Six Double Bassists, with two Sydney double bassists added: Sydney jazz stalwart Jonathan Zwartz and Jacques Emery, whose label People Sound released the album. These are compositions in the jazz style, leaving room for improvisation for the musicians - the credits on Bandcamp list the soloists on each track, except Movement I - but even here, the piece begins with a chaos of plucked rhythm & melody and low drones. Just before the minute mark, the whole ensemble coalesces on a righteous bassline, with individuals adding rhythmic ornamentation around it. The album is full of body-pulling basslines the equal of Johan Berthling's work in Fire! and elsewhere - high praise! - while also capitalising on the instrument's expressiveness, including Helen Svoboda's patented floating stopped harmonics. There's also a secret pleasure in hearing all those slaps of finger and string on the instruments' fingerboards. Glorious.

Holy Tongue meets Shackleton - Ancient Model [AD93/Bandcamp]
Originally the duo of powerhouse drummer Valentina Magaletti and UK bass music producer Al Wootton, Holy Tongue last year added Magaletti's Vanishing Twin bandmate Susumu Mukai on bass, and together they forge a path through arcane postpunk dub. Add to that trio the music & production of Sam Shackleton and you basically get a different angle on the same influences - Shackleton first became famous for his dubstep & post-dubstep productions on Skull Disco with Laurie Osborn aka Appleblim (see below), but for years has created bizarre & idiosyncratic post-psych-folk-techno(?) on his "label" Woe To The Septic Heart! - an aesthetic that gels with the new-old nature of many of Valentina Magaletti's collaborations. Suffice to say, The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now is even better than the sum of these parts.

gi - knots [Absorb]
The follow-up to her late-2023 EP Orange Chorus Blonde Reveal continues the utterly original quasi-organic, textural IDM created by Eora/Sydney artist gi aka Gigi De Lacy. I hesitate to say "jungle" as any sampled drum breaks are ground into fine dust, but there are skittery drum'n'bass and footwork influences here, as if performed by an ensemble of cicadas and marsupial mice gathered round a faulty transistor radio. I can pretty much guarantee you've never heard anything quite like this, in the best possible way.

KASHIWA Daisuke - Green [Virgin Babylon]
Only a couple of months after his latest album Ice mixed up his classical, postrock, glitch and IDM influences, KASHIWA Daisuke is back on Virgin Babylon Records with a single track of glitched, nervous micro-beats, foghorn bass tones and piano chords, a track that Ryuichi Sakamoto would've been proud of. Lovely.

Trinity Carbon - Lost Everything [forthcoming self-released EP]
Low End Activist - Self Destruction [forthcoming on Sneaker Sound System]
Well, I did mention Laurie Osborn above. The man known as Appleblim has had a low-key collab with Jamie Russell (aka "Patrick Conway" aka Low End Activist) called Trinity Carbon. They have a couple of EPs under their belt going back as far as 2018, and an album from 2021, but they will shortly launch a series of self-released 12"s of skeletal grime/dubstep, distilled to its essence and in keeping with the minimalist approach Appleblim employed from the start with Skull Disco. Low End Activist also has another album coming, this time on his own Sneaker Sound System, which is also on a highly minimalist tip with ambient bass and deconstructed hardcore. Municipal Dreams evokes his younger years growing up in the Blackford Leys estate, learning first-hand the effects of inequality on working class lives.

Brian Gibson - Melting Menace [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Lightning Bolt bassist Brian Gibson has for some time been involved with video games, currently Puddle with Mike Mandell. Thrasher is Gibson's second video game soundtrack to be released on Thrill Jockey, a distillation into 12 tracks of the generative music heard in the game. It's made up of old-school synth patterns and driving beats, and while it doesn't have the noise-punk thrash of Lightning Bolt, it's got a lot of energy and tense apprehension.

Hidden Orchestra - Broken (Edit) [Hidden Orchestra Bandcamp]
Joe Acheson's Hidden Orchestra has worked recently on video game soundtracking too, but in 2023 released a wonderful album of his imaginary orchestra's typical sounds: live trip-hop/jungle beats, strings, bubbling clarinet and other acoustic instruments invisibly edited by Acheson. "Broken" is a new EP taking the album track and rebuilding a couple of versions as well as providing instrumental sources including some of the foley sounds that went into the original. As usual the music is sumptuous and timeless.

Khrystyna Kirik - Phantoms Of Perception [Flaming Pines/Bandcamp]
The third in Flaming Pines' Ukrainian compilations, curated by Igor Yalivec, is out in October, titled Resistance. As usual it features experimental musicians from Ukraine, with earnings passed on to the musicians and to charitable causes in the country that is still resisting Russia's invasion. Tonight's preview track is from sound-artist Khrystyna Kirik, a slow surge made up of electronics and detailed sounds from self-made instruments, objects and possibly voice and double bass.

Meemo Comma - The Poet [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Lara Rix-Martin aka Meemo Comma continues their inexorable musical growth, having mastered deconstructed and reconstructed rave and IDM over their last few releases. Decimation of I is structured after the philosophical science fiction novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, famously adapted for film by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker. Both works explore a world transformed by alien visitors who are never seen. The album's title refers to the "ego-death" experienced by the story's protagonists. While the album promises a variety of musical styles, the first single "The Poet" is a minimalist classical piece for clarinets.

Laura Cannell - See the Moon and the Stars [Brawl Records]
Laura Cannell - Everything is Hidden in You [Brawl Records]
The latest album from the indefatigable British multi-instrumentalist Laura Cannell interrupts her year-long "Lore" series (latest is MAMMOTHLORE and there will be an August one alongside this album, no interruption!). On The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined, Cannell applies her historically-informed part-improvised, part-composed chops to the music and life of 12th-century composer, scholar and nun Hildegard von Bingen. On bass recorders and a 12-string knee harp, both at times played through a delay pedal, Cannell's always-atemporal music creates a bridge to one of the few female creators and scholars whose works have, in some form, survived to the present. Inspiring as well as inspired, the music here is more Cannell than von Bingen, but a fitting tribute.

Ex-Easter Island Head - Magnetic Language [Rocket Recordings/Bandcamp]
Although there's no hint on Bandcamp and I don't think it was announced originally, Rocket Recordings have released a limited CD version of UK quartet Ex-Easter Island Head's Norther - which is great as it gives me an excuse to play an album I criminally missed when it came out earlier this year. The band are a quartet now thanks to longtime collaborator & sound engineer Andrew PM Hunt, whose Dialect project has an album coming on RVNG Intl. Each track takes a different approach to sound, with the band's experimental guitar techniques never far away. Throughout, there are gorgeous scintillations of guitar harmonics, weird pitch slides, guitar strings played as percussion... as well as bass and drums, an aeolian harp (played by the wind), and on this track, sampled syllables of their own voices replayed through guitar pickups and rebuilt into a perfect encapsulation of post-folk-rock-tronica. Gorgeous.

Andrew Tuttle & Michael Chapman - Five and Twenty Days For Lunch [Basin Rock/Bandcamp]
I'll repeat some of what I wrote from this album's last single here:
British guitarist and singer-songwriter Michael Chapman worked across many genres up until he passed away in 2021 aged 80. His latter-day following was confirmed in the Tompkins Square-issued compilation Oh Michael, Look What You've Done: Friends Play Michael Chapman, featuring Lucinda Williams, Meg Baird and Thurston Moore among others. One Australian fan was Brisbane's Andrew Tuttle, who's made a career around electronically-mediated banjo and acoustic guitar-picking soundscapes. By luck, Chapman's partner Andru had been enjoying Tuttle's album on Basin Rock, Fleeting Adventure, in the years after Chapman's passing, and so Andrew Tuttle has had the privilege of expanding on and reworking the unfinished final instrumental recordings of Chapman. The album Another Tide, Another Fish is out through Basin Rock just this coming week and features the original recordings on a second disc. On this second single, Andrew's fingerpicked banjo is slowly subsumed under evocative, drawn-out and reversed guitar tones.

Michael Scott Dawson - Mono Lake (feat. K. Freund) [We Are Busy Bodies/Bandcamp]
K. Freund - How, On Earth [Last Resort/Bandcamp]
Trouble Books - Aggregate [Lejsovka & Freund Bandcamp]
K. Freund - Buzzy on Accelerants [Last Resort/Bandcamp]
Coming out on September 6th from Toronto label We Are Busy Bodies is an album from Canadian sound-artist/producer Michael Scott Dawson called The Tinnitus Chorus. It's an album of "wide-eyed" collaborations, pitting his field recordings, tape loops and instrumentation against the contributions from mostly-fellow Canadian friends. One such friend is fellow experimentalist K. Freund, who I know from two stunning albums of composition & glitchwork by himself and Linda Lejsovka as Lejsovka & Freund, and their trio Trouble Books with Talons''s Mike Tolan. Freund's piece with Dawson has the characteristic white noise fuzz and stuttering glitch found on many K. Freund works, set in a kind of drone-folk Americana context. I discovered that Freund only just released a new solo album, Hunter on the Wing, in March this year, from which we heard two pieces of some kind of glitch-jazz made from rough loops, tenor sax, piano and other sonic detritus. I cannot recommend strongly enough that you check out the two Lejsovka & Freund albums Mold on Canvas and Fatal Strategies, but while you're there, the subtle indietronica of Trouble Books' Balance is absolutely lovely too.

Listen again — ~205MB

Sunday, 18th of August, 2024

Vale Dean Roberts 😢 Plus minimal folktronica; loop-gaze; bass, techno, jungle, doped trip-hop; industrial drone; and variants of contemporary classical.

LISTEN AGAIN, I beg you. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

Dean Roberts and the Black Moths - the fake and detached [Ritornell/Staubgold/Bandcamp]
Dean Roberts - smash the palace and what nerves you've got [kranky/Bandcamp]
It was with incredible sadness that I read Lawrence English's tweet on Dean Roberts' death a few days ago. The New Zealand experimental songwriter, guitarist & sound-artist hadn't released an album since 2000's Not Fire, but there was no sign that he was ill, as far as I know. He was a year younger than me. I won't speculate on his passing, but he's someone who, in his gentle way, touched many in the experimental music scene, from the free noise band Thela (with Dion Workman and Rosy Parlane, two other NZ experimental iconoclasts) to the glorious glitched postrock of Autistic Daughters (with Austrian experimental stalwarts Martin Brandlmayr and Werner Dafeldecker, and our own Chris Abrahams as a frequent guest), and with his solo sound-art/noise/experimental song as White Winged Moth and under his own name. Randomly choose music from his discography and you might hit some granular drone work or hushed, skeletal songs draped over sparse guitar tones and scattered kraut-jazz drums. In tribute - since we're not going to have any new music from this important figure any more - I chose two solo works from my earliest encounters with his music. 1999's Dean Roberts and the Black Moths Play The Grand Cinema was originally released on Mille-Plateaux sublabel Ritornell, and re-released by Staubgold in 2004. Here the "song" elements are mostly buried in more freeform noise/postrock/sound-art gestures. In 2003, postrock/ambient label kranky released be mine tonight, an impossibly fragile collection of songs drawing Talk Talk's postrock into a more freeform jazz world, still with the glitch elements he'd picked up in the late '90s. Vale Dean.

Lucy Sissy Miller - Horse Girl [Mêtron Records]
Lucy Sissy Miller - The Lighthouse [Mêtron Records]
It feels like the techniques of abstraction and alienation of form used by the likes of The Books, Lucky Dragons and others a couple of decades ago have been absorbed by younger music-makers (whether through Japanese computer games and the outer reaches of J-pop, PC Music's gleeful repurposing of IDM, and the general destruction of genre boundaries) so that the bio for French-British singer-songwriter Lucy Sissy Miller's minimalist folktronica album Pre Country comfortably namechecks Laurie Anderson and Imogen Heap without mention of any of the artists or movements mentioned above. And while I can hear elements of soccer Committee's collaboration with Machinefabriek and others, ultimately Lucy Sissy Miller's gorgeous abstracted, electronically processed take on country or folk music is all her own, and I'll be very cross with you if you don't check it out.

Seefeel - Hooked Paw [Warp Records/Bandcamp]
Back in 2010 & 2011, shoegaze/electronic pioneers Seefeel released a new EP & album after some 14 years's absence. Now after almost the same length of time the core of Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock have put together a new album (albeit only 6 tracks - surely an EP), with the familiar sampled & looped vocals of Peacock pulsing through through dubwise electronics. They've always had a temporally displaced sound - constructed entirely through digital technology but somehow analogue, even organic sounding. It's a pleasure to have something new, and we'll hear the rest of Everything Squared in a week and a bit!

I7HVN - Chains of Bronze [YUKU]
Bangalore-based producer I7HVN (which stands for Ishan) lands on YUKU with his Innate Needs EP after an album released last year on Indian label Qilla. It's dark and fittingly bass and breakbeat-oriented for YUKU.

Or:la - Chant (Midland's 'Arpeggiate Me' Remix) [fabric Originals]
Irish producer Orlagh Dooley aka Or:la is the founder of the experimental house/techno/bass label céad (Gaelic for hundred). Her new album Trusting Theta is out on fabric Originals on September 20th, and in the meantime UK producer Midland has taken the very minimal funky electro tune "Chant" and overlaid lavish pulsating synths - a real winner.

Braille - Cost Of Living [Hotflush Recordings/Bandcamp]
NY musician Praveen Sharma was one half of Sepalcure with Machinedrum between 2010 and 2016, releasing the bass music of the time, inspired by UK garage, dubstep and house. With Benoît Pioulard in Praveen & Benoit he explored more ambient & folky terrain as well, but his solo moniker for some time has been Braille, under which he explores garage, house and ravey breakbeat. Following a string of singles & EPs with Hotflush Recordings, Scuba's label has now released the Triple Transit album, an unrelentingly sunny collection of breakbeat synth bangers. Lovely really.

Hassan Abou Alam - Mesh Mafhoom [Nerve Collect/Bandcamp]
Hassan Abou Alam - Khalsana ft Ziad Zaza [Nerve Collect/Bandcamp]
Out August 30th through Nerve Collect is the latest album from Cairo-based producer Hassan Abou Alam, whose Bandcamp bio says he's been making tunes since 2008. I've certainly been following him for a few years, with releases on Banoffee Pies and YUKU among others. His music's an electrifying amalgam of UK & US bass styles with fidgety North African percussion and thunderous sub bass. On a couple of tracks here he's joined by fellow Egyptian rapper Ziad Zaza adding an extra energy.

Muadeep - La Branco [YUKU]
German producer Patrik Schmidt aka Bobby Kudlicz is clearly a fan of Frank Herbert's Dune, given his project Muadeep's similarity to "Muad'dib" and a previous EP named HARKONNEN. He's also collaborated last year with Amon Tobin under his Two Fingers alias. His new album Connected comes via YUKU, a collection of mid-tempo rollers with a lot of African & Middle Eastern samples throughout. Tasty stuff.

Callum Asa & 140 - Drips (Low End Activist Drizzle Remix) [Earful of Wax]
"Drips" is a collaboration between London electronic producer Callum Asa and the nearly-ungoogleable grime MC 140, originally featured on Earful of Wax's EARFUL OF WAVS Vol. 1. Now Earful of Wax have released Low End Activist's skeletal remix on a limited 7" dubplate, with proceeds to Palestinian families.

Mantra - Schemes and Dreams [System Music]
V.I.V.E.K's System Music, like his own music, tends towards 140bpm, primarily dubstep, so it's interesting and excellent to hear key jungle DJ and RuptureLDN co-founder Mantra collaborate with the label on her forthcoming 4-tracker, simply titled SYSTEM EP. Dubstep tempos, held down by the sub-bass, but with some nimble breakbeat action. Boh!

The Person - Dub23 Flight1058 [Acroplane]
Defcon - Astropolitique [Acroplane]
Belfast label Acroplane has been around since the early netlabel days, and nowadays they're again a "netlabel" because aren't we all now, in the age of Bandcamp? They're celebrating their 18th birthday with a compilation called XVIII, released 13th of September, with all proceeds for the first year to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Meanwhile a few tracks are available, including the one from The Person (another almost-ungoogleable artist!) - it's kind of breakcorey jungle that slips into dub reggae halfway through. When it's out you'll also get Defcon's track which is a crisp amalgam of jungle and footwork with flittery synths. There's lots of great stuff on here, acid and IDM and techno and breakcore as well.

Ehye אֶהְיֶה - Symphonic [Woodland Creatures]
Ehye אֶהְיֶה - Durge [Woodland Creatures]
Shmuel Hatchwell appeared on Utility Fog earlier this year with a release under his hoyah moniker for Low End Activist's BRUK label. On the 6th of September, Hatchwell's Ehye אֶהְיֶה will release his Forgot My Password album on Skwirl's Woodland Creatures label. While "hoyah" is an esoteric feminine form of "to be" in Biblical Hebrew, "Ehye" means "I am". The vibe here is a beat tape of dope-addled instrumental hip-hop filtered through a contemporary bass lens, with pitched-down voice samples, each track based around a few samples, drum machine beats and sub-rattling kick'n'bass. It's low-key brilliant and I'll be coming back to it a lot. Fans of Odd Nosdam, DJ Food, DJ Screw or Kenny Segal's productions with billy woods take note.

Lilacs & Champagne - 144 York Way [Temporary Residence, Ltd/Bandcamp]
Lilacs & Champagne - Dr. Why [Temporary Residence, Ltd/Bandcamp]
Speaking of minimalist, self-aware hip-hop... Alex Hall and Emil Amos are both members of the excellent experimental/instrumental rock band Grails. Their new album as Lilacs & Champagne comes 9 years after their last, and if Grails are instrumental psychedelic rock, this is a kind of instrumental psych-hip-hop. It's not so interested in the contemporary bass music that permeates Ehye's beats, but for head-noddin' beats and musical collage it's up there with the best.

Connor D’Netto x Yvette Ofa Agapow - Material IV - dopamine deficit [A Guide To Saints/Bandcamp]
From Room40 sublabel A Guide To Saints comes a stunning album from two Meanjin/Brisbane-based musicians: composer Connor D’Netto and sound-artist/noise artist/vocalist Yvette Ofa Agapow. Calling the album Material is a statement in itself, as the two musicians build roiling drones, rattling anti-rhythms and swooping bass from pieces of metal, tape, natural fibres and other objects as well as voice and electronics. The first track is an imposing, droney beginning that I encourage you to press through as no one track is representative of the whole.

Laurence Pike - Mountains Of The Heart [The Leaf Label/Bandcamp]
We've heard the opening "Introit" from Laurence Pike's album The Undreamt-of Centre a few weeks ago, in which his usual drums, samples and keyboards are augmented by the Sydney Philharmonia Choir's VOX choir (made up of 18-30 year olds), suggesting the gravitas of a requiem. "Mountains Of The Heart" re-centres the music on Pike's percussion, so that when the voices enter near the 4-minute mark it's an unexpected opening-up of the sound-field. The voices merge into synth drones, which subtly slide downwards as the piece concludes. I'm looking forward to hearing these pieces in context, and might bring you a sneaky preview of some album tracks in the next week or two.

Family Ravine - Part Chance [Death Is Not The End]
Kevin K.W. Cahill runs the Power Moves Label & Library (also a label), releasing not only his music under many monikers but also other artists of an experimental bent, somewhat ambient, somewhat lo-fi. His Family Ravine seems to focus on folky guitar that mingles with field recordings and weird found-electronics. It's truly hard to pin down, and that's what's so beautiful about it. On (I​’​ll) waltz in and act like (I) own the place, released on entirely eclectic London label Death Is Not The End, the guitars - acoustic and electric - are joined by thumb pianos, mandolin and radio static, for freeform music that's too active to be drone, but too formless to be folk. Whatever it is, it's gorgeously beguiling.

Amy Brandon - Intermountainous (2017) [New Focus Recordings/Bandcamp]
Canadian composer Amy Brandon was a performing guitarist for many years, and wrote many works for herself on classical guitar with electronics. More recently she's retired from performance, and composes endlessly rewarding music for a variety of instruments, encouraging extended techniques on flute, string ensembles, a duo of cellists and more, drawing the musicians through ghostly sussurations to wild scratching and screeching - as well as lyrical passages. Rather than strings or flutes, however, I've chosen the one guitar work on her new album Lysis, performed here by Julian Bertino. The 10-string guitar here creeps through disquietingly microtonal lines until spectral electronics join and the guitar begins some softly rhythmic fingerpicking passages, with those strange micro-detunings catching the ear. The fingerpicking builds into a passage of fast, repeating phrases that are almost overwhelmed by windy white and pink noise, before dying down to microtonal phrases and shimmering electronics.

Listen again — ~208MB

Sunday, 11th of August, 2024

A lot of moody music tonight, some different types of "jazz", music from Norway, Japan, the Netherlands, UK, Germany, Canada and of course Australia.

LISTEN AGAIN, it's a mood. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.

ØKSE - Amager feat. billy woods [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp]
ØKSE - Amar Økse [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp]
Starting tonight with a record that literally came out today. It's odd to find essentially a free jazz record on billy woods' great underground hip-hop label Backwoodz Studioz, but here you have it. ØKSE are a Norwegian-American quartet, as far as I can see, featuring the great Norwegian saxophonist Mette Rasmussen and Norwegian bassist Petter Eldh whose Koma Saxo we heard earlier this year. Eldh plays synths and sampler as well as holding down some wicked bass, and Haitian composer, percussionist & turntablist Val Jeanty adds scratches and other sounds (she's credited as "sound chemist"), while NYC-based Setter Harris pounds out live free-jazz breakbeats. So it's pretty out-there stuff already, and the rhythm section is heavy and nimble. On their self-titled debut record, half the album (four tracks) has guest appearances from NYC hip-hop vocalists, including both billy woods and his Armand Hammer other half ELUCID. The word "alchemical" may be overplayed in music writing, but there's definitely some kind of magical transmutation going on here - from this afternoon's listen this is shaping up to be a 2024 highlight already!

Coppé - My Funny Valentine (Sonny-Boy Anderson & GIZAT Rework)* [Mango + Sweetrice Records/Bit-Phalanx Music]
Coppé - Fever [Mango + Sweetrice Records/Bit-Phalanx Music]
Coppé - Cry Me A River (DJ Kensei Remix) [Mango + Sweetrice Records/Bit-Phalanx Music]
A few weeks ago I previewed the new album from Japanese chanteuse and experimental electronic pop veteran Coppé, someone who's worked with the likes of Plaid, Atom™, Terminal11, Georgia's Nikakoi and many others. Aside from IDM & experimental electronica, she is well-versed in jazz and classical music, and in 2022 decided to do a "pure jazz" album - albeit still with an interesting sound. *​(​Un​-​)​tweaked featured mostly covers of jazz standards, with one or two originals, and of course the "un-" implies *( -​)​tweaked, which is now here in the form of a remix album. It's all great, with some admirably radical reworkings. Having selected the first track, I then went searching and discovered that Sonny-Boy Anderson is none other than the son of The Designers Republic™ founder Ian Anderson, whose cartoonish, typeface-obsessed designs defined Warp Records, Pop Will Eat Itself and more from the beginning of the '90s. Sonny's drum'n'bassy rework of Coppé's "My Funny Valentine" cover is a collaboration with young UK artist GIZAT. And then we have a brilliant deconstruction of her "Cry Me A River" by DJ Kensei.

MAREWREW - Etukuma Kara (M.RUX Remix) [Pingipung Records/Bandcamp]
Staying in Japan, but heading north, we find MAREWREW, an a capella quartet of women keeping alive the musical tradition of the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido and other northern islands of Japan. The Ainu's culture has long been suppressed, and the "Ukouk" singing here is incredible: repetitive canon structures (rounds) in which the singers move the reptitions slightly out of phase - live! MAREWREW's original album Ukouk. Round Singing Voices of the Ainu 2012-2024 was released earlier this year by Pingipung Records, and I plan to dive in soon, but in keeping with the musicians' desire to keep this tradition alive, the label have commissioned a series of remix EPs. From Ukouk Remixes Pt. 1, today we heard the lovely melodic techno of Berlin's M.RUX.

WaqWaq Kingdom - Hado [Phantom Limb/Bandcamp]
To me, WaqWaq Kingdom's new album is their best yet. The duo of Kiki Hitomi (who's worked with The Bug in early King Midas Sound, Goh Nakada aka Gorgonn in Dokkebi Q and many others) and Shigeru Ishihara (aka DJ Scotch Egg aka Scotch Rolex, who has indeed also worked with Goh Nakada) are both known for heavy bass projects, but with WaqWaq Kingdom they've brought an unhinged psychedelic approach to reggae influences along with Japanese traditional musical styles and dance styles from all over. On Mind Onsen, there's a slight reduction in manicness (slight!) and a re-affirmation of BASS, especially on the second track, "Hado".

b0t23 + inoperative system - Simplo (Roel Funcken Remix) [From Roel's Bandcamp subscription/original here]
I subscribe to the Bandcamp of Roel Funcken, which includes the music he & his brother Don made as Funckarma. Since the late '90s they flew the flag of IDM high, incorporating dubstep and bass music and ever-increasing technological advances. Roel's output has slowed of late, but every month we still get something exclusive - there's a huge amount in the archive! This month is a remix of US artist b0t23 + Spain's inoperative system, a track from their recent Reticle EP reworked in Funcken's trademark glitchy, low-slung funk.

samwho - St Elmo's Fire [Intercept Records/Bandcamp]
Staying in the Netherlands, young Rotterdam artist samwho has made a name for himself DJing in his hometown (a place with a long fabled history in techno and rave music). His new EP is Gaea's Good Grace for Dutch label Intercept Records, two tracks of energetic percussive bass techno.

Modern Norman - The Frogs [Suitably Bizarre]
MastaGlow - We Wanna Roll [Suitably Bizarre]
Louis Hubris Nooz - Dunrobin Stobie [Suitably Bizarre]
Last week I played the first track I could find of "hit em", the genre that sprung up out of a dream Drew Daniel related on Twitter a mere two weeks ago: it's in 5/4 time at 212bpm with super crunched out sounds. Drew is one half of highly-beloved experimental electronic duo Matmos with his partner M.C. Schmidt, who played a hilarious, memorable and beautiful hour and a quarter show at Phoenix Central Park on Friday night. Sorry if you missed it. Also on Friday, Drew woke up to the bizarre fever-dream of not just some partial joke tracks on Twitter, but a whole compilation of hit em. Disposable Heroes of Hit Em was conceived by Adrien 75, who in a bizarre coincidence I met in 1999 at a Matmos gig in NYC shortly after he had a hand in one of my favourite IDM compilations ever. Adrien asked a few friends including Adelaide's Tim Koch and NZ's Michael Upton (the three have a project together called Takamu), and along with a couple of other friends they put the compilation together in a few days. It's a lot of fun, only occasionally acceding to the breakcore/jungle temptation found elsewhere, while also covering melodic IDM, skittery ambient and frenetic Dave Brubeck sampling (I mean, of course). Tonight's three tracks are from Adrien, Michael and Tim in that order, FWIW.

Mattr - Amaranthus [Mattr Bandcamp]
Out now also is a single new track from Birmingham IDM producer Mattr. Amaranthus follows the album Pheno released a few months ago, and it's his lovely twinkly ambient-melodic synth work with a clattering drill'n'bass beat. Joyous.

Meat Beat Manifesto - Into The Sun Pts 1&2 [Yellow Machines]
Jack Dangers' Meat Beat Manifesto was there at the beginning of jungle, arguably presaging UK hardcore and jungle with the 1990 breakbeat masterpiece "Radio Babylon". "Into The Sun Pts 1&2" is Meat Beat Manifesto's side of a split 12" on London label Yellow Machines, who appropriately focus on hybrids of IDM, hardcore and jungle, and that's very much what we get here, flitting through various styles of breakbeat accompanied by NASA samples I think. It's a corker, if not quite as intense as MBM's recent collaboration with Merzbow, Extinct.

Boris Hauf - hw26 om [Shameless Records/Bandcamp]
The one track I played tonight can only show a portion of what's in store on German musician Boris Hauf's album CLARK3 - from the edges tongues grow. It's the third in his CLARK series, the previous two of which came out on vinyl & digital and focused more on minimal techno and ambient sounds. The third continues Hauf's meditations on humanity's current state - digitally divided, heading towards climate collapse - and looks to a "futuristic interstellar co-existence". The music here varies from glitchy post-industrial ambient to technoid experimentation and faster-paced IDM. Oh, and "CLARK3 is produced AI free".

o'summer vacation - 宿痾(Shuku-a) [Alien Transistor/Bandcamp]
Although courtesy of The Notwist's Alien Transistor label, our next selection veers into noise punk with Japanese trio o'summer vacation. The riff-heavy sound is produced only with bass, drums and voice, the bass screaming and heavy with effects, and vocalist Ami slathering herself in delays. Brilliant.

Stick In The Wheel - A Thousand Pokes [From Here Records/Bandcamp]
Somehow segueing perfectly out of o'summer vacation are Stick In The Wheel, English folk duo of Nicola Kearey & Ian Carter who in the last more than a decade have revived raw, acoustic traditional folk (with various cohorts) and simultaneously taken folk into strange electronic climes (Ian Carter was a founding member of dubstep iconoclasts Various Production, and makes music solo as EAN). But you can also find them making distorted punk-folk like on the title track for their forthcoming album A Thousand Pokes, which takes a satirical look at the current age from their unique standpoint.

Clark - Green Breaking [Throttle Records/Bandcamp]
Also forthcoming is Chris Clark's expanded soundtrack to Naqqash Khalid's award-winning film In Camera - which incidentally I can't wait to see. Clark's abilities as a classical composer of great sensitivity are combined with his electronic production - seemingly on everything he does - so this comes highly anticipated.

The Smile - Don't Get Me Started [XL Records/streaming links]
Thom Yorke & Jonny Greenwood's "not-Radiohead" project The Smile, with jazz drummer Tom Skinner, already put an album out this year, but now they're back with a moody electronic single, great enough on its own but further augmented by the trippy (as usual) music video created by Aphex Twin collaborator Weirdcore.

Robag Wruhme - CDV feat. Bruno Pronsato (Remix-Edit) [Kompakt/Bandcamp]
In the late '90s and early '00s, Gabor Schablitzki was one half, with Volker Kahl, of one of my favourite IDM groups, Beefcake. Their material is mostly out of print but you can hear their three albums on YouTube here, here and here - drill'n'bass and acid madness, post-Aphex melodies, glitchy processing and all. Then in the early part of the new millennium Schablitski started to find success as a techno DJ with Wighnomy Brothers and making remixes and original music both under that name and as Robag Wruhme. I was really not attuned to tech house or 4/4 techno at the time, so it wasn't until years later that I realised the brilliance of this new phase... Now Robag Wruhme is a favourite, and he's still a bit of a larrikin - weird things always happen somewhere in his tracks, but there's also a lot of heart and melody. This track features Berlin-based Bruno Pronsato aka Steven Ford, purveyor of microhouse, minimal techno and also rather experimental sounds at times - in fact I think it's Robag's "Remix-Edit" of a live set of Pronsato at Club Der Visionäre .

Severin Black & Owen Pratt - I (Vulcanised Types) [Archaic Vaults]
Here's some visceral industrial-noise with a direct connection to the physical world. Severin Black runs the Archaic Vaults label, whose releases are usually mastered by France-based sound-artist Owen Pratt. After an excellent untitled cassette a few years ago, their debut album is simply titled Duet. Many of the tracks are derived from field recordings and feedback - self-propelling "duets" such as one between bass amp feedback and an open snare drum, for instance. "I (Vulcanised Types)" may or may not feature hardened rubber, but it's one on which the drones are set back a little, driven by primitive industrial rhythms. This is richly grimy music.

Lawrence English - ShellType [Room40/Bandcamp]
For his forthcoming EP ShellType, Room40 boss Lawrence English has been thinking about the blurring of our selves as we become dependent on, and augmented by, technology. This blurring is found in the four tracks too, where field recordings and human-created sounds are conflated into sculpted drone, whether the gamelan hiding somewhere in the winds on all four tracks or the drawn-out voices reverberating through the title track, while sub-bass looms like distant foghorns and mysterious sounds crackle at the edge of hearing. This is one to listen loud on your stereo late at night, or lying on the floor with headphones on: 25 minutes of immersion.

Erik K Skodvin - A dark escape [Miasmah Recordings/Bandcamp]
Erik K Skodvin - Prayer [Miasmah Recordings/Bandcamp]
Miasmah Recordings is the remarkable label created by Berlin-based Norwegian musician Erik K Skodvin, a home to certain types of dark experimental music that often fit the moniker "acoustic doom". Skodvin is a cellist, guitarist and producer (often releasing music as Svarte Greiner), and is extremely adept at creating engrossing, troubling atmospheres from very minimal sources. The new digital EP Afterwar is music made for the docu-fiction film of the same name by Danish director Birgitte Stærmose, shot over 15 years to document the lives of four survivors of the Kosovo war. Skodvin's music is moody and moving.

Mark Hjorthoy - A Heart Full Of Hollow Wounds [Unexplained Sounds Group]
Italian musician Raffaele Pezzella curates the Unexplained Sounds Group, a group of record labels covering industrial and experimental music from all over the world. One of their great achievements is the "Anthology of Experimental Music From..." series, which has covered experimental music from regions like Latin America and the Balkans as well as specific compilations from Iran, Lebanon, China, Indonesia, Finland and beyond. The latest is Anthology of Experimental Music from Canada, featuring mostly artists I've never heard of. Tonight we have one of the less abrasive offerings, a beautiful piece of pulsating synths, Fender Rhodes (I'm guessing), crackles and tape hiss from Vancouver-based Mark Hjorthoy.

Gregory Paul Mineeff - Advancement [whitelabelrecs/Bandcamp]
Wollongong composer Gregory Paul Mineeff's latest album is a slight departure from his usual ambient/post-classical piano & synths. Released on English label whitelabelrecs, the album adds quiet, minimal drum machines and nostalgic electric guitar throughout. A lovely closer for tonight.

Listen again — ~210MB

Sunday, 4th of August, 2024

Thanks to Giulio for filling in last week while I was away - excellent selections, and even some text about everything that was played 🤗
Tonight, we've got all the genres: hardcore punk, classical hyper-pop, nu-spiritual jazz, nu-folktronica, shoegazetronica, singer-sound-artist, feral ruralcore, computer music poetry, glitchnaturebeat, footwork-cumbia, experimental electronic, jungle, hit 'em, grime, minimal electronic, arcane dub, postrocktronica, free-improv-tronica, bass-vox-improv, and neo-post-classical.

LISTEN AGAIN and degenrify yourself! Stream on demand via FBi Radio, podcast here.

Show Me The Body - Shelter [CORPUS]
Not long after NYC hardcore punk trio Show Me The Body released their debut album Body War - itself a creative expansion of contemporary hardcore - they dropped their original Corpus I mixtape, which saw them hooking up with diverse artists from underground hip-hop and experimental electronica, with the likes of Moor Mother, Eartheater, Denzel Curry, Dreamcrusher and more. That was 2017, and there've been a couple of albums since then, and a world tour or two - and an excellent remix EP mind you - but they're finally getting back to CORPUS with Corpus II EP I (the existence of which implies at least EP II). The credits are missing on Bandcamp (you can see them on the cover image though), but a bunch of rappers do feature. That said, the melted loops and raw power of "Shelter" are a winner for me.

Darian Donovan Thomas - Flirting [New Amsterdam Records/Bandcamp]
Darian Donovan Thomas - Flirting - Coda [New Amsterdam Records/Bandcamp]
Out now on New York-based classical crossover label New Amsterdam Records is an album from composer, violinist, producer and multimedia artist Darian Donovan Thomas. Among many credits, he's found playing violin on Arooj Aftab's breakthrough album Vulture Prince. I believe A Room With Many Doors: Night is his debut solo album proper, mostly performed, sung and produced by himself. "Flirting" stands out as a piece of hyperpop with hyper beats and post-PC Music melody (and some cute phrasing) that glitches and dissolves into its Coda, where Phong Tran (also responsible for the album art) contributes sampling and abstraction with various software & hardware, while Thomas plays looped & pitch-shifted violins along with vocals and bells.

Sharada Shashidhar - Soft Echoes [Leaving Records/Bandcamp]
LA-based singer, composer & producer Sharada Shashidhar released her debut EP Rahu on Leaving Records in 2020, in which jazz and r'n'b were treated through hip-hop and electronic production techniques. Four years later, she's gearing up to release her debut album Soft Echoes, which sees Shashidhar take on the role of band leader, with an ensemble featuring LA-based Australian bassist Anna Butterss and other accomplished young players (saxophonist Devin Daniels has also released a couple of excellent beat tapes on Leaving Records as Kara-Do). Shashidhar's compositions meld vocal techniques from Indian classical music with evocative and catchy spiritual jazz - and electronic production techniques. I for one can't wait to hear the rest of the album.

Andrew Tuttle & Michael Chapman - Wholly Unrelated To Four Seasons [Basin Rock/Bandcamp]
British guitarist and singer-songwriter Michael Chapman worked across many genres up until he passed away in 2021 aged 80. His latter-day following was confirmed in the Tompkins Square-issued compilation Oh Michael, Look What You've Done: Friends Play Michael Chapman, featuring Lucinda Williams, Meg Baird and Thurston Moore among others. One Australian fan was Brisbane's Andrew Tuttle, who's made a career around electronically-mediated banjo and acoustic guitar-picking soundscapes. By luck, Chapman's partner Andru had been enjoying Tuttle's album on Basin Rock, Fleeting Adventure, in the years after Chapman's passing, and so Andrew Tuttle has had the privilege of expanding on and reworking the unfinished final instrumental recordings of Chapman. The album Another Tide, Another Fish is out through Basin Rock at the end of the month and features the original recordings on a second disc. Andrew's post-production has created something quite enchanting on the first single, "Wholly Unrelated To Four Seasons", in which guitar tones are stretched and layered in a dreamy, underwater fashion.

Seefeel - Sky Hooks [Warp Records/Bandcamp]
Back in 2010 & 2011, shoegaze/electronic pioneers Seefeel released a new EP & album after some 14 years's absence. Now the core of Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock have put together a new album (albeit only 6 tracks), with the familiar sampled & looped vocals of Peacock pulsing through through dubwise electronics. They've always had a temporally displaced sound - constructed entirely through digital technology but somehow analogue, even organic sounding. It's a pleasure to have something new, and we'll hear the rest of Everything Squared later this month.

Simon Fisher Turner - The “Special Relationship” [Mute/Bandcamp]
Simon Fisher Turner - Purr [Mute/Bandcamp]
Simon Fisher Turner - She Lowers Her Arms [Mute/Bandcamp]
So finally the actual new album from Simon Fisher Turner is out. SFT has been many things in his career, from child actor and young pop idol to composer and sound-artist who's worked with Derek Jarman and created some of the most alluring and boundary-pushing audio work in the last few decades. Instability of the Signal is a quietly alluring album, sprinkled with his humour and frequently pulling the heartstrings. It's deconstructed pop, constructed from four "S"es: "Slivers" of samples from David Padbury's Salford Electronics, "Strings" from the Elysian Collective (previously the Elysian Quartet), found "Sounds" and field recordings, and "Singing" primarily from SFT himself. Fisher Turner also incorporates ideas from filmmakers Breda Beban and Hrvoje Horvatic, and words from Harold Pinter, whose "Special Relationship" we heard tonight. It's tied together with subtle gestures like the eerie drone that starts The "Special Relationship" and reasserts itself at the close of the following track "Purr". The "Slivers" sometimes develop into rhythmic figures, the "Strings" often insert themselves with fragmented romantic chord patterns. It's a gentle & unassuming tour-de-force of the sort that an accomplished, adventurous artist of 5 decades can create.

Udder J Russell - After Midsomer [Udder J Russell Bandcamp]
Johnny Russell aka Ronny Juzzle aka Then Dof, Other J Russell, Udder J Russell and more, was once upon a long ago one half of folktronic duo Clickits with John McCaffrey aka Part Timer. I've followed his work as best I could, and lately those Udder/Other aliases have been highly active on Bandcamp. For someone who doesn't care to promote his work in any way, he's putting quite a bit of work into some very creative music, not least the analog festival for rabbits EP, where we find ourselves at an organic dream-rave with wonky found-percussion, caveman feedback and balooning bass tones. It seems unfair that Johny Part Timer & I are the only people who've bought it as yet. Go on.

John Wall and Alex Rodgers - Herd Vectiv [John Wall Bandcamp]
British composer John Wall is an important figure in electronic music despite being self-trained. His work since the mid-'90s (when he was already in his 40s) has involved painstaking organisation of tiny samples into strange, disarming narratives. Since 1997's Fractur he has pioneered a glitch aesthetic that incorporates his recordings of British improv musicians, avant-garde composers, heavy metal and pop, albeit rarely recognizable. Since 2006, Wall has been creating collaborative works with British spoken word artist Alex Rodgers, whose acerbic poetry and equally-acerbic delivery seem at first glance contradictory to the austerity of pure sound-art. But Wall's compositions are both meticulous and full of energy - even anger - that's expressed even in these abstract sound-structures that rarely coalesce into anything resembling beats and barlines. This is seemingly all present in their latest missive, "Herd Vectiv", with clattering bodies of sound tumbling and syncopating in ways that suggest songwriting structures, and when Rodgers' voice does appear, it's vocoded and autotuned into some kind of song(?) - this is the Brechtian alienation that claire rousay employs too, invoking pathos from abstraction. Another contradiction - in effect flipping all of Wall's divorced, un/anti-music into a kind of pop; or at least anti-pop.

Moss Kissing - 35mg to 75mg to 150mg [Colectivo Casa Amarela/Bandcamp]
Moss Kissing - Dont make plans [Colectivo Casa Amarela/Bandcamp]
Zackary Enright-Wells' latest album Between Summer & Now (a fragmented diary of depression) also draws pathos from abstracted forms, here referencing club music from ambient un-structures, scuffed field recordings, granulated piano refrains, anti-song. It's the kind of deeply engrossing, quietly revolutionary stuff that the Portuguese Colectivo Casa Amarela have been sneaking out for some years. Really, don't miss this!

Joaquín Cornejo - Cuica [YUKU]
This track from Ecuadorian producer Joaquín Cornejo actually came out a year or so ago on YUKU, but it's available right now, for free, as part of YUKU's 4th Birthdizzle Compapoodle. These big label anniversary compilations only stay up for about a month, so grab it now for a great primer on one of the best experimental electronic labels around at the moment.

E-Saggila - Every Voice At Once [Northern Electronics/Bandcamp]
Rita Mikhael, Iraq-born producer & DJ based on Toronto, released her latest album Gamma Tag, earlier this year on Northern Electronics. I'm not sure why I only just got onto it, but probably because there's a CD (yay) and it must've taken a while to find it in stock? THAT'S MY EXCUSE! Mikhael's usual tendencies are here - industrial & noise undertones but on a firm footing of bass, techno and IDM, seriously great.

Comatone - Start Synthy (2008) [Feral Media]
Another month, another entry in the unreleased hard-drive-plundering C-TONE20 EP series from Comatone, aka Blue Mountains-based Greg Seiler. On EP4, it's more acid squiggles and breakbeats galore, from across the 20+ years being covered. It's streaming on Spotify and elsewhere... Really ought to be downloadable but for now it's just a streamfest!

Kloke - Lost Technology [Unknown To The Unknown/Bandcamp]
Last week the venerable UK label Hyperdub, run by Kode9 and home to forward-thinking bass music of all sorts, announced their first ever jungle album, and it's a co-production from two of the current jungle crop's greatest: the UK's most enthusiastic jungle proponent Tim Reaper and the Naarm/Melbourne-based Kloke. There's a single out now, but in the meantime Kloke also released a whole album of sparkling space-jungle on Unknown To The Unknown, The Cosmik Connection Lost Tape. "Lost Technology" mixes intense beat-mashing with dreamy synth pads, and incidentally uses one of the same breaks that Reaper & Kloke use on In Full Effect's first single, "Alienation". Brilliant stuff.

Alex Reed - Hit 'Em Dreamgrl (Remastered) [Alex Reed Bandcamp]
On Monday - yes, still less than a week ago! - the one & only Drew Daniel aka The Soft Pink Truth, one half of Matmos, sent out this tweet:

had a dream I was at a rave talking to a girl and she told me about a genre called “hit em” that is in 5/4 time at 212 bpm with super crunched out sounds thank you dream girl

— DREW DANIEL (@DDDrewDaniel) July 29, 2024

Within hours the tweet had gone viral and people were making "hit em" tracks. One of the first I saw was by Alex Reed - an academic like Drew, and usually making postpunk, post-industrial and, well, other stuff. But his "Hit 'Em Dreamgrl" - pushed out within a day but since remastered, remixed & b-sided - is as close to what I'd have imagined the genre to sound like, i.e. breakcore in 5/4. Hilarious and yet strangely compelling?

Kruz Leone - Ready & Live (Deft Remix) [Ninja Tune Production Music/Stream here]
A hefty piece of grime from Kruz Leone here gets remixed by London bass/dusbtep/jungle producer Deft, which is intriguingly released via Ninja Tune Production Music, a large library run by Ninja Tune of music specially selected for synch - that is, for licensing for film, TV, advertising etc. I wouldn't immediately think of a hard-hitting grime/d'n'b hybrid like this being ideal for synch, but now I can hear it hitting in a hard transition in some urban TV action drama...

Tutu Ta - Could Be Monk [Tutu Ta Bandcamp]
London producer Lorenzo Geary has a few releases under his belt as Tutu Ta, all with a dub bent, but bent dub that ventures into homegrown techno or postpunk, with pitch-shifted vocals stumbling out of the mix, and a sense of indistinct druidic ritual around the whole thing.

Alva Noto - HYbr:ID Sync Inter [Noton]
A sharp slam of the brakes and we're in a very different bass-land, the pristine electronics of Carsten Nicolai's Alva Noto giving us the third of his HYbr:ID series of somewhat more beat-oriented albums. Sub bass plays an important role, and crisp, glitchy beats with synth tones as cold as the desert at night. Nicolai's music is as purely electronic as it comes, but the beautiful CD package (a standard that was set early in the Raster-Noton/Alva Noto timeline) comes with gorgeously laid-out full-page diagrams describing each track - worth the slightly higher price of admission.

Memory Drawings - Some Vague Sense Of Belonging (Epic45 Remix) [sound in silence/Memory Drawings Bandcamp]
I've mentioned Memory Drawings a fair bit before, the trans-Atlantic, dulcimer-led postrock band that I've had the honour of contributing cello to for some years now. I played a track from the latest album Deathbed Requests when the album came out back in June, but I now have possession of the beautiful double-CD edition from Greek label sound in silence, sporting a second disc of remixes and tied up in a fabric envelope. Each Memory Drawings album has come with bonus remixes & reworks, and an excellent lineup of colleagues is found here (see the list on their Bandcamp). It's pretty nice to hear my cello recontextualised in the hands of Northern English rural indietronica mob Epic45.

Kai Angermann, Frauke Berg, Axel Ganz, Anja Lautermann - HFM02 03 [Trestle Records/Bandcamp]
Ross Downes & co's Trestle Records has been host to a number of interesting series since their inception, including the One Day Band sessions bringing musicians from around the world together for a day in a studio, and then during lockdown the From Isolation series of online collaborations. Their latest venture is a series called HFM, from Haus Für Musiker, a creative space just outside of Düsseldorf. The label took up residence for a week and convened sessions with local musicians. For the second EP, we have percussionist Kai Angermann (also on electronics), electro-acoustic musician Frauke Berg, electronic musician Axel Ganz and multi-instrumentalist Anja Lautermann, playing cello, flute and who knows what else. There are propulsive krautrocky numbers, drones and glitching sound-art, and fragmented spoken word at times - interesting listening and a good introduction to some Düsseldorf musicians!

Theodora Laird & Caius Williams - Dummy [Cherche Encore/Bandcamp]
Versatile singer Theodora Laird (who you may have heard as feeo on Loraine James' breakthrough 2019 album For You and I) and experimental bassist Caius Williams got together after seeing each other play and talking to the same mutual friend - Williams asked whether Laird needed a bassist, and Laird asked whether Williams had a boyfriend! Which is very sweet and they are partners as well as a duo. Their debut together, Crosspiece, is released on Cherche Encore and showcases Williams on both resonant double bass and shuddering Fender bass guitar, and Laird channeling jazz, classical, trip-hop and singer-songwriterly vocal styles. Both musicians have incredible technique and also process their sounds liberally, but while this is improvisatory and experimental music it's also enormously touching. Couldn't recommend highly enough.

Alex Zethson - Terrella [Thanatosis/Bandcamp]
Also enormously touching is a new single track from Stockholm's Alex Zethson on his Thanatosis label. Zethson is comfortable in jazz, noise, contemporary classical, postrock and more, and "Terrella" is a sweet little piano piece with a light-footed melody in the left hand and pulsing chords in the right. Soft and expressive.

Listen again — ~205MB